When I finish this review, I’m going to send Sam Kean an email through his website. I’m not going to laud his clever prose or praise his memorable collection of stories in The Violinist’s Thumb.

I’m not going to tell him how I was struck by the way his chapter-by-chapter narrative allowed knowledge to emerge as a whole rather than piecemeal, just as the sequence of chemical units known as A, C, G and T along a DNA molecule encodes the protein-building process through which a living organism emerges from a collection of cells.

No, my email will have a more prosaic purpose: As per his invitation at the start of the book, I will ask for help with the hidden DNA-related acrostic, “a genetic ‘Easter egg,’ if you will,” that he says he encoded in the text. I was so busy enjoying the book that I forgot to look for it.

Kean sets an entertaining tone in the first paragraphs of the introduction: “And yes, I’m writing this book despite the fact that my father’s name is Gene. As is my mother’s name … Jean and Gene Kean. … Bottom line is, I dreaded learning about DNA and genes in science classes growing up because I knew some witticism would be coming within two seconds of the teacher turning her back.”

It is the reader’s good fortune that Kean did not deny Gene and Jean’s genetic and environmental contributions to his scientific curiosity and linguistic skill. Instead, he took advantage of that endowment to develop his literary prowess, just as Niccolò Paganini exploited “a genetic disorder that gave him freakishly flexible fingers” to become a virtuoso violinist.

For some readers, the best part of the book will be the rediscovery of greats such as Mendel, Darwin and Watson, through little known stories — even Lamarck, whose discredited theory that environmental conditions can cause heritable change was a Marxist favorite (and has recently been shown to be correct in an odd sense because of a discovery known as epigenetics).

Others will enjoy going behind the scenes of the Human Genome Project, where J. Craig Venter’s agitation from inside and competition from the outside led to the project’s early completion. Venter is widely admired and despised, and Kean explains why both responses are appropriate.

Still others will be captivated by Kean’s stories of lesser-known but important characters such as Johannes Friedrich Miescher, who discovered DNA in white blood cells in 1868 by studying the pus on freshly removed hospital wound dressings. And it’s hard to ignore fascinating tidbits of knowledge such as the uncomfortable way that Arctic explorers discovered what natives already knew about the toxicity of polar bear livers; or that a gram of DNA contains as much digital information as a trillion CDs.

Finally, readers should not overlook the joy of reading the book’s copious set of research notes, such as one relating to the naming of Megalosaurus, whose bones were discovered in the 1600s and thought to come from giant humans. Kean speculates that the femur’s resemblance to human male anatomy might have originally led to a “less-than-dignified moniker” for the first known dinosaur species.

I could continue to list examples of Kean’s intelligent, enlightening and entertaining prose. But editorial constraints require me to stop writing. Besides, I’ve got an acrostic to find and solve.

Physicist Fred Bortz’s most recent book for young readers is Meltdown! The Nuclear Disaster in Japan and Our Energy Future.

books@dallasnews.com

The Violinist’s Thumband Other Lost Tales of Love,War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code

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